Success is something most human beings desire and gravitate towards. The word itself has a rich, positive connotation.

A lot of products and services get sold based on the promise of success. Buy this or do that and will find yourself in the winner’s camp!

But what does success mean to you? Is it about the achievement of short or long-term goals or more external measures of what society defines as successful? Or fundamentally is it about the quest for happiness and well-being that we think it will provide?

Success may be an abstract term but it has a lot of emotional and psychological currency attached to it.

For me, the essence of success embraces the gift of learning, growing and developing both personally and professionally and then being able to contribute in a meaningful way.

How about you? How do you measure your success?

And how do you sustain success?

To find fulfilment in life, you have to find something that is bigger than yourself. Dr. Martin Seligman,  an eminent American psychologist and  founder of  Positive Psychology outlines three types of happiness.

The first one is the Hollywood type, he calls the ‘pleasant life.’  This consists of having as many pleasures as possible and savouring them but in spite of these pleasures, happiness can still be elusive.

The second type of happiness is described as the ‘good life’ where people learn what their strengths are and use them as much as possible in their daily life.  This is seen as being more attainable.

The third form of happiness he describes is the ‘meaningful life.’  This is ‘ineluctably pursued by humans….knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying them in the service of something larger than you are.’

As we look towards the New Year, make sure your success measures are based on things that really matter to you focusing on your mission, core purpose and values, and vision.

Use these touch points to make good decisions as you navigate the joys and challenges of the New Year.

Here are some other success insights to ponder on:

• Success is passion and perseverance over time

• Success means taking the right action more often than not

• “Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life – think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.”   Swami Vivekananda

• “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”  Bill Gates

• Success and failure are two sides of a coin. Failure can teach more than success but learn from both!

• “We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them. We need to measure whether we’ve been successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned.” Angela Lee Duckworth

• Maintaining success can be harder than achieving success

• “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” Michael Jordan

• “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill

Jasbindar is a coaching psychologist who loves helping her clients be successful – whatever this means for them.